TWAH(=These Worlds Are Here) -writing workshop invites trans-, non-binary, queer people and women to come together for thinking, dreaming and writing together about possible futures and worlds to come. The aim is to look for pleasure and enjoyment in writing as tools for naming and exploring the endless multiplicity, fluidity and transformation of needs, sexuality and gender, gaining autonomy and creating queer futures. We also play and create our own characters by writing: we write about and as characters from whose perspective we wish to experience the world for a moment.

TWAH consists of two parts: a 4 day long writing workshop and an audio speech choir installation in the mobile art gallery Gas, based on the text material generated in the workshop. This event is orchestrated by the artist and educator Ana Teo Ala-Ruona.

Both individual and collective writing practices will be dealt with in the workshop. The act of writing is approached as a fictional queer world-making practice. Writing is a political tool for naming, re-naming, making visible, audible and felt the dreams that we care for. Writing is also a vehicle—it moves, touches, orientates and re-orients us. We will ask how can queer SF (speculative fiction) be understood as somatic fiction in practice—one that moves and affects the body of the writer deeply. Can somatic speculative fiction be considered as ”home-building” or ”home-coming” with each and every word? Can the writer feel it resonating on their cellular levels, re-writing the body, and training it for the queer futures?

The workshop will be followed up by an audio installation in Gas. The installation will be a heterogenous speech choir in which some of the written words will be transformed into a spoken form. If they chose, participants in the workshop will all leave some sort of a verbal or audio trace of their written worlds for the installation.

The workshop will be held in English, but everyone is welcome to write in any language comfortable to them. Also, one does not need to have any established relationship to writing.

Workshop is limited to 15 participants. Places will be allocated on a first come first served basis. Note that the workshop has reached capacity, but you can sign-up for the waitling list here

This project is supported by Frame Contemporary Art Finland, the Finnish Cultural Foundation and Poets & Writers.

Ana Teo Ala-Ruona is a performance and visual artist and educator based in Helsinki. They are interested in generating new forms of collectivity, interdependence and futurities in artistic practice, while creating space for silenced, unheard or non-normative, queer and trans narratives and experiences. Drawing from techniques found in the fields of feminist pedagogy, contemporary performance and theater, activism, and literature, they create collaborative strategies for feminist speculative fiction in lived practice. https://anateoalaruona.net

Image by Ana Teo Ala-Ruona and Elina Minn